I remember seeing The Running Man when I was a kid, because of course I did. Sci-fi action movies with Schwarzenegger were a no brainer. I remember, years later, reading The Running Man, by Richard Bachman[1], and recognizing enough of the plot elements (and, okay, the title) to know it was where the movie came from. And I remember being astonished by just how much better the book was than the movie.[2] Ironically, I remember almost nothing about the plot of the movie itself; what I’m envisioning is Arnold running around a laser tag arena in a shiny lycra jumpsuit and then eventually beating up Family Feud’s own Richard Dawson, but surely, surely there was more to it than that. Counterpoint, of course, is how readily I gave up on that movie once I read the book.

Fast forward 30-odd years, and it seems someone who actually liked the book has made a new version of the movie in which things are a little more… serious-minded. The Running Man is the primetime jewel in the Network’s crown of 24×7 reality TV game shows in which downtrodden losers try to earn enough money to escape from the slums, which of course they never will, but in the meantime the Network rakes it in from an enthralled America. (This Bachman guy was prescient, I tell you.)

One such loser, Ben Richards, has been blackballed from pretty much any available job because he keeps trying to help his coworkers instead of letting them fail and die, and there’s no room for woke chumps in the new America. But he has a sick daughter and a wife who’s about one night away from becoming a prostitute to makes ends meet[3], and before you know it he’s signed up for the show. Which is a 30 day game of hide and seek between the Runners and… pretty much everyone else. Anyone who reports a Runner’s location gets a wad of dough, and then the Goons (ie, corporate police) and the Hunters (ie, the recurring characters who America is rooting for, most seasons) swoop down and kill the Runner who got reported.

Hiding from literally everyone, as you may be able to conceive of, is a tricky matter, and doing it for 30 days is nearly impossible, especially under the cameras everywhere panopticon we call modernity. (Plus, you can’t just hide in the deep woods and wait it out, because you have to mail in a 10 minute tape every day or you get disqualified.) Anyway, that’s it. That’s the whole movie. Will he succeed where everyone else has failed?

Okay, that’s not the whole movie. There’s also the thread, woven throughout, in which a mirror is held up to us as an audience Tarantino-style, and we get to think about just how complicit we may or may not be in the coming dystopia.

[1] Or someone else, who can remember
[2] This was in my callow youth when I didn’t know just how readily Hollywood will scrap a book’s plot entirely in favor of their own idea.
[3] As opposed to doing it because it’s her chosen career path, which would be a whole different story.

Probably at some previous point, I understood that Jurassic World referred not just to the park, but to the fact of the dinosaurs having gotten loose and now they live here too, like it was the Jurassic all over again[1]. Anyway, they made a trilogy on that theme, and now that Chris Pratt has made enough money, they decided it was time for more Marvel alums to get in on that sweet, sweet dinosaur cash.

Here, therefore, are the things you should know about Jurassic World: Rebirth.

1. There’s nothing “rebirth” about it. It’s still the same dinosaurs from the same consistent series of movies at the same consistent starting point as it was for every prior sequel. Furthermore, it doesn’t even feel like it’s meant to be a franchisal rebirth. This told a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and no real hooks for sequels starring the same characters.
2. It’s a little bit of a rip-off of a loving homage to several movies. I can see Jurassic Park 3 in there (with the sailboat family shoehorned into an otherwise straightforward snatch and grab plot), a decent chunk of Aliens (if Newt’s family had survived along with her, and to be fair that may cancel out JP3), and a whole lot of those old GI Joe 5-episode miniserieses they’d put out every year where the Joes and the Cobras are chasing parts of, for example, a weather control machine.
3. There was no compelling reason to make this movie. Other than “give me some cash”, it doesn’t have a story that needed to be told. That sounds worse than it actually is, the story was fine, extraneous things can often be fine. But it was extraneous more than it was fine, you know?
4. With that caveat: it was also fun. Possibly because I cannot accept what the writers posited the world to be like 30 years after the rise and fall of InGen, the dinosaur-cloning company. Those character inhabiting that world are all, “meh, I’ve seen dinosaurs, and mostly they’re boring murder machines, so who cares if they go extinct again, or that they ever existed in the first place?” Whereas I will probably never lose my childlike wonder for them, and they keep on looking pretty great in these movies. Thanks Steven Spielberg.
5. The less said about the pointless “what if we make mutant dinosaurs?” subplot, the better, Pretend it never happened, and you have a better movie. Because wow, it adds nothing and is probably the thing that most made me consider whether the movie was necessary, a la point 3. If you have a subplot that would have been your main plot except you flubbed it entirely? That’s a bad sign.
6. …but it was still fun, and I do not regret having seen it. The movie was not ruined for me, I just selectively edit a handful of the dinosaur characters to be something just as useful for the service needed in the plot during those scenes, but not pointless and dumb at the same time.
7. I do a little bit regret not seeing Superman instead. But only a little bit.

[1] But mainly the Cretaceous, not I suppose that this is important to their larger point.